Barefoot Basics

First and foremost, barefoot is an option. That is all that it is. It is not the answer to every horse related problem; it is not the only way to keep a horse; it is merely a way to keep your horse's feet.

Trimming, even good trimming, does not guarantee soundness. As a matter of fact, shoeing does not guarantee soundness either. If either method came with guarantees, then shoeing verses barefoot would not be a debate.

When I first started trimming my own horses, I embraced "Barefoot" like a religion. I felt invincible and that I could accomplish anything by getting the evil shoes off of horses. Nothing was a problem, so long as the horse was barefoot. Well, it has been terribly disappointing to realize that only hoof issues can be cured by proper trimming. It is even more disturbing to realize how many horses have other underlying problems.

Some horses struggle without shoes. Some struggle because of mechanically bad feet and others struggle because of health issues and management problems. The hard part is figuring out which it is; or which combination it is.

Most mechanical problems resolve quickly. Metabolic and environmental problems haunt you until you fix the underlying issue.

If your horse has not shown marked improvement in a short amount of time (three or four months at the most), then you are not dealing with just a hoof issue. Even if a horse is not completely sound, it should be noticeably improving. The feet should be looking better and the horse should be more comfortable.

PLEASE don't let your horse crawl around for months and months or years. If your horse is not getting more comfortable, then start looking for other problems. Do something different.

Don't just concentrate on the feet. Look at the diet or problems in other parts of the body. Sometimes we get hyper focused on the feet.

This is a horse that has major mechanical problems with her feet. Apparently, she does not have much else going on in her body, because she is healing so quickly. When the shoes were first pulled, she was miserable. She could barely move. As of Dec., she is comfortable running around the pasture with the other horses and can even walk across gravel without much discomfort.

The pictures from behind just show that her heels are starting to stand up a bit and are lifting the frog up off the ground. Her heels are no longer as folded under.

If your horse does not seem to be improving, don't beat yourself up and assume you are trimming wrong. Unless you are taking way too much off or really leaving flares, then it is more than likely something else going on with your horse.

If your horse has been doing very well barefoot and then suddenly isn't, trimming is not your problem. I see it over and over and over, the horse goes lame and the owner immediately thinks they are doing something wrong with the feet.

Nine times out of ten, they haven't done anything wrong. Something in the horse's environment changed. Here on the East Coast it usually got wet and the grass grew. This scenario translates to the feet got softer and the diet got richer.

I know this is sounding like horses cannot go barefoot in this environment, but that is not true. The horses that struggle without shoes, usually struggled with shoes.

A horse's health is reflected in the feet. Even when you have a metal shoe on the horse, they still have all the same issues. The problems may not be as glaring, but they are still there.

If you want a minute by minute update on your horse's health, take the shoes off.

Does this mean some horses cannot go barefoot? Well, if the horse has chronic low grade laminitis or the horse hurts somewhere else, then they may not ever be completely comfortable barefoot. Take it from me, some horses will never be comfortable even with shoes. I lived with such a horse. She crawled across gravel with four shoes and pads. I loved this mare. She was my dream horse, but she lived her life in misery.

Reflection had good looking feet. They were not terribly deformed or contracted, but she was never comfortable.

I look back now and realize she had low grade laminitis most of her life. If I had just known the symptoms and some of the changes I could have made, she would have lived a much longer and happier life.

This horse has beautiful feet, but he is periodically sore on gravel. He is generally tender from the middle of April until some time in November.

His real problem is that he is insulin resistant and any time that there is any green grass or weeds, he is sore. Even though he is sore on gravel, he is comfortable on softer surfaces and works well in boots. As long as his diet is closely monitored (dry lot, grass hay and CarbX), he is useful and happy.

He is purposefully kept barefoot so that we can monitor his health. This guy had severe rotation and sole penetration in all four feet. We need to know if his diet is getting too rich and his intermittent soreness alarms us to dietary changes.

Insulin resistance and other metabolic problems are a big reason a lot of horses are so sore barefoot. Luckily, there is much more research going on and the awareness is growing.

You may not think that laminitis plays a part in your horse's life, but it more than likely does. The signs may have been very small or fleeting, but I am convinced almost all horses periodically get laminitis.

Laminitis is not merely the horse completely unable to move and stretched out in the typical founder stance. Laminitis signs can be much more subtle. It can be the dead broke (read... lazy) horse that won't hardly move or the old school pony that has the most horrific stilted trot and awful canter. What is sometimes thought of as arthritis in the older horse is actually laminitis.

Gait changes are another indication that your horse suffers mild laminitis. The faster he goes the stiffer his gaits become. It can be a horse that normally is willing to canter, suddenly not going into the canter when asked. It can be the horse that has a shortened stride that becomes more noticeable on hard surfaces and faster speeds.

What about the horse that normally runs to the barn at feeding time and now walks or trots?

For years, I relied on digital pulses to confirm laminitis. Don't be fooled, you do not need a strong digital pulse to have laminitis. A strong digital pulse indicated moderate not mild laminitis. If you can easily find the pulse, you need to change something in your horse's environment now.

Ill fitting tack, injuries, and other chiropractic problems also complicate keeping horses sound.

After years of trimming, Ruth and I have finally come to realize if your horse has laminitis, you are in trouble. Unless you resolve the problem, he may never be sound.

The frustrating part is that the feet seem to reflect the horses over all health. What shows up in the feet is not necessarily a foot issue.

If your horse is struggling with too much grass, too many chemicals, age or other metabolic issues, then you will constantly see problems with the feet . Trust me, no matter how well you trim, you will not see long lasting improvement.

These are not really foot issues. This is management and health issues that show up in the feet. If you do not address the overall problem, you will be battling with the same feet for months or years.

This is very important to understand. If you do not address what is causing the problem, you will not be able to fix the feet. The way you trim is not the problem.

The pictures below are from one of my mares. I personally think her feet look a bit odd, but she is impervious to any footing.

Healthy hooves do not have any particular form, they are merely feet that are comfortable.

It is amazing how much the foot can change. Even terribly deformed feet can change considerably, but all with in reason. If there have been boney modifications or the digital cushion has atrophied, then changes will happen more slowly and less dramatically. Dramatic loss of digital cushion and remodeled coffin bones are the slowest mechanical problems to resolve. Flares and imbalances turn around very quickly.

There is not a perfect trim. How could there be? A hoof is a live organ. What may be perfect one moment is guaranteed to change. Don't strive for perfection. It does not exist.

There is also no perfect environment. Each horse is an individual. Here on the East Coast, it is often too wet and too green for some horses to live out on pasture twenty-four hours a day. Some horses do fine and others do very bad. Another words, you have to look at each horse and what he needs. There is no ideal.

In the end, you will be responsible for making all the decisions about your horse. You need to decide what is right. Everyone has an opinion, but that does not mean that it is right.

Your horse knows better than any professional. If he is not comfortable barefoot, you may need to look at more than the feet.

There is no recipe and nothing that will work in every situation. Nothing. It is up to each individual to decide what is working for your horse. That can be amazingly hard.

Ruth and I try to figure out what works for most horses. There is no way that we can show all situations and all scenarios with trimming. I wish we could.

When I was a child, I used to rasp my ponies feet to make them look pretty. I was admonished by the farrier for doing this. He told me that there was much more to trimming than just making the feet look pretty. Here it is thirty plus years later and I am figuring out that I was right. There is not much more to it than tidying up the feet and making them look pretty. Just rasp off the flares and roll the edges.

Don't make trimming too hard. The more you think, the more often you will do too much and make the horse sore.

Trimming is like training. The less you try to "control" the horse, the more "control" you get. It is all in the timing and the amount of pressure that you apply. If you push too hard, the horse will either push back or blow up. Trim too hard and that foot will grow back with a vengeance.

On the flip side, You can be too soft and have the horse act as if you do not exist. Clarity and decisiveness are key when dealing with horses.

Each horse is different. Some only need you to whisper, while others need directions spelled out more obviously.

Just like training horses, you have to experiment to figure out the right amount of pressure to use. I don't mean how hard to use the tools, but how much hoof needs to be taken off. If you lightly rasp down the flares on the walls and it never seems to get any better, then try going a little further. If on the other hand, you rasp down too far and the horse is terribly sore, back off.

The learning curve for trimming is a lot like a swinging pendulum. Some people will violently swing back and forth between too much and too little. Each swing gets progressively smaller. Eventually, the swinging settles.

I was like this. Over the years, the pendulum has quit swinging so wildly. For me, I doubt the pendulum will ever completely stop, but it is now much more subtle.

I have found that there seem to be two separate personalities that trim. The first is the "Should I do more?" group, nine times out of ten they should not. This type of person usually ends up with the horse walking around on nubs. Usually the feet are picture perfect, the bars are well groomed, and there is not a flare of any flavor to be found. The next group is the "Oh my God, I have taken off too much!" group. Usually this type of person hasn't actually done enough.

I tend to be the "Should I do more?" group, so I have had to really make myself back off and leave the foot alone.

Just keep in mind what type of person you are when you have a knife or rasp in your hands. You may need to push yourself a bit or you may need to back off.

A better trim, not even a perfect trim, should show some improvement in the horse.

I felt it was important to put this information out there because there are a lot of people trimming on their own and wondering what they are doing wrong. I feel very confident that the trimming is often not the problem.

If you have already done any reading about barefoot trimming, you have seen over and over that movement is the key to success. We whole heartedly agree. This is one instance that more is definitely better. Our goal is to have the horse feel better after each trim.

The horse needs to move, and if we make him sore, he is not going to want to move. If we make a horse sore (or if he was sore prior to trimming), we still encourage them move.

We try to find what surface is reasonably comfortable for the horse or sometimes we resort to boots. Our first goal is to make sure the horse is comfortable on the footing he must live on daily. We do this by not removing healthy tissue. Next we walk them on other surfaces and see what they can tolerate. If they can only tolerate grass, then we walk them on grass and slowly introduce other surfaces. We use the horse as the guide. We test what surfaces, speeds, and maneuvers he can tolerate. As long as the horse stays comfortable, we build them up to harder, faster, and more complicated riding. Comfort and moderation is the key. Observe how the horse feels and use this as your guide.

Trimming schedule

if pulling shoes- pull the shoes, round the edges, and make sure the bars aren't weight bearing. We do nothing more with the first trim. Two weeks later, we do a basic trim with all 5 steps. We check the horse again in two weeks. We then re-evaluate on a two to four week schedule.
first trim without major pathologies- we trim going through all five steps and evaluate again in one month (two weeks if we positively can't stand waiting). I really only trim from the top now, but choose which ever approach you feel more comfortable doing.
first trim with pathologies (for example lots of flares, unbalanced, high heels)- we trim going through all five steps and evaluate on a two week basis for a few trims. There often is nothing to do in two weeks, but it is good to check. We do not recommend trimming any more often than every two weeks.

Evaluating every two weeks is often very short lived. Normally, we only trim this often for one to three trims. We then extend the trims to once a month, and eventually most horses go on about a six week schedule. By using the landmarks to evaluate hoof balance and growth, we know if anything needs to be done. If trimming isn't necessary, then we don't trim. Remember, we don't ever want to take off beyond the live sole plane.



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